QPID Health sequences the “digital DNA” in your health record

Alvin Yu, MD, Clinical Content Engineer - July 22, 2015 - As an engineer turned physician who returned to engineering as a QPID clinical content engineer (yes, it’s confusing!), I’ve been fielding a lot of questions from friends and family about the exciting problems our startup is tackling. Here is one way of understanding what we do.

As we know, we all have DNA stored within our cells. DNA is the basic building block of life, encoding our genes that determine a large part of our biology – height, weight, gender, and health. This is what nature has given each one of us as a starting point in life.

What we may not realize is that we all also have an extraordinary amount of “digital DNA” that is stored in our healthcare record. This digital DNA also encodes our biology and determines our health. Every time a doctor writes a note, reports a lab result, interprets an x-ray, she is encoding a digital gene that is stored away in the medical record.

DNA is, at its core, a long string of letters that on the outside makes no sense to humans. However, over the past few decades, scientists have made great strides sequencing our DNA and extracting information about our genome to predict and improve health. Just like biologic DNA, our healthcare records contain thousands of documents that often start to blend into a seemingly meaningless long string of letters.

This is where QPID comes in. QPID sequences the digital DNA stored in your entire healthcare record to derive insights for doctors, nurses, case managers and quality personnel. QPID understands these digital genes, making it possible to decipher, predict and ultimately prevent diseases and avoid risks (such as hospital acquired conditions) for individuals and entire populations.

This is how QPID helps clinicians make us healthier and the reason I decided to join the QPID family!